I’m here to talk to you today about the rise of social media in South Africa – it is exciting to see a potential space where young people’s voices can be heard, one which can help to place youth issues on the national agenda. But today I’m going to ask you to look beyond the stories that we like to tell about the successes of social media, stories of Arab and other Springs, Occupy and so on, and see what we’re really dealing with when we rely on these forms of media in our local organisations and networks.

Francis Nyamnjoh has explained beautifully why social media is so exciting to us in Africa – its sociality builds on local traditions of informal communication, or ‘pavement radio’. Building on this idea, Herman Wasserman pointed out how SMS and other mobile communication works to help ordinary people obtain information, share it and create possibilities – especially where mainstream media and free expression are out of reach.

So we tend to see social media as having powerful potential for citizen media and participation. That’s the promise that ‘citizen’ journalism and social media could be opening new opportunities for democratic citizenship.

Who gets heard?

And yet, when we look at who actually gets heard on social media platforms, unfortunately the picture is not so democratic. We know that, on online platforms, our attention is governed by what we call ‘power laws’. Economically these power laws tend to mean that the rich just get richer. On platforms like Twitter, where there are an infinite number of voices, and where people have a limited amount of time, power laws and the way information flows through the network means that, while new voices can rise to prominence relatively quickly, a small number of people tend to get more and more attention.

In a nutshell, this means that the large majority of people are still very unlikely to be heard, while others are ‘trending’, celebs who get huge boosts of attention and access to the microphone.

SA’s Massive rebellion of the poor

Let’s move our focus to young people in South Africa, which has been called the country with the highest number of community protests in the world. These protests mostly challenge the state’s non-delivery of basic services such as electricity, water and housing. My students created a map visualising the ‘service delivery’ protests that police data recorded between 2009 and 2012. In that time apparently the police dealt with 2.9 ‘unrest incidents’ each day.

So we may ask, given these incredibly frequent community protests, how are people expressing their discontent? Researchers like Professor Jane Duncan and my student Nicole Wilcox have shown that we definitely can’t really rely on traditional media to tell the stories of the protests. Mainstream media are particularly bad at reporting the perspectives of the protesters. Given these gaps in coverage, you may be wondering whether social media is helping to convey the protestors’ stories to a broader audience? You may well ask – let’s look at a case study of a protest that happened in my own home town of Sasolburg in January 2013.

Zamdela’s burning

Let’s visit Sasolburg – an industrial town in the rural Free State province. Sasolburg was literally built by and for a group of wealthy chemical industries situated in the area. Despite this wealth, in the township of Zamdela, the average income is now R400 per month.

In January, 2013, Sasolburg residents embarked on a protest against some extremely unpopular decisions involving a proposed merger of their local municipality and a deeply indebted neighbouring municipality. Government turned a deaf ear to the protest, and things turned really ugly. Television screens were full of burning cars and people looting. In the course of the protests, police killed four people.

Sadly in a country where people’s rights are routinely just ignored protesters may have found that spectacular violence is a way to get attention really fast. As community leader Nkanyiso Xaba explained:

[The protestors] have marched, they handed over a memorandum and no one is willing to come back and answer to their memorandum. So the resolution that we are taking is that the community will continue burning tyres to demonstrating their anger until somebody listens.

Analysing social media

Nonetheless, to understand how these events played out on social media, we need to look at two very different but equally important questions

The first is, when the protests are reported, who speaks?

And the second is, when we learn about the protests via social media, who actually gets heard?

Twitter

So let’s first look at the question, who speaks? I took a random stratified sample of tweets from the time of the Zamdela protests. The tweets were captured using the Twitter REST API.

Tweets were downloaded on 23 January 2013 using NodeXL ‘s Twitter search network importer, resulting in a sample of 1599 tweets posted from 899 distinct Twitter accounts. (NodeXL used Twitter’s ‘garden hose’ search API – v 1.1.). Graph metrics for the search network were calculated based on retweets and mentions in the network.

Of these tweets, 571 (or 36%) included a link to an image. These tweets formed the basis of the content analysis.

I divided the dataset of tweets with linked images (n=571) into two strata according to how influential the tweets were in the larger search network. Accounts with the highest in-degree metric (>=2 retweets or mentions) were selected for separate analysis.

This identified the most influential accounts for content analysis of the images considered highly sharable, newsworthy or important in this network

The less influential tweets constituted the majority of the tweets (66%). These had not been retweeted and their author had not received mentions in the search network (i.e. in-degree <2). A smaller set of 192 tweets with linked images (34%) were more influential (in-degree >=2). These tweets had been retweeted, or the author had received mentions in the network.

Most tweets received fewer than two retweets or mentions

I drew a stratified random sample from these groups for the content analysis. After duplicates were removed, the final dataset for the content analysis consisted of 27 images from more influential tweets and 18 images from less influential tweets.

Despite the potential for citizen media to tell the story from the protestors’ perspective, mainstream media appears to have played a dominant role in defining which images we saw on Twitter. The 27 highly retweeted tweets in the random sample together constituted 34% of the edges in the Twitter search graph. Thus this was pretty much a media ‘echo chamber’, which highlighted spectacular and highly “newsworthy” images of violence, arson and particularly of looting and its aftermath.

Sources of influential images posted to Twitter

Citizen media (mostly from the white right wing) accounted for only about 11% of the images. Print news publications posted the majority of the images that were circulating (51%), perhaps because of their strong networks of photojournalists and links with freelance photographers. Broadcast media posted only 27% of the images, perhaps because their large team of journalists covering the story spent a good deal of time under siege in the Zamdela police station, but possibly also because they were not posting still images for their audience to share.

Geocoded tweets show limited mobility of journalistsSABC journalist tweeting while trapped in besieged Zamdela police station

Finally, online-only news (particularly the Daily Maverick) was relatively well represented with 11% of the images.

Visualisation of most influential images of Zamdela protests

I’m sure you’re wondering why the Zamdela protesters weren’t telling their own stories on Twitter in the same way as we have seen activists from Occupy or Ferguson do. In the first place, social media demographics are different in South Africa, and they were even more different in 2013. At the time of these protests Twitter, much beloved by South African journalists, had been adopted by the wealthier middle class, not by people earning only a couple of hundred rand per month.

In the second place, at the time, most South Africans used feature phones, not smart phones. Although they could access Facebook and Twitter, many still preferred cheaper instant messaging. Consequently, lots of grassroots participation was likely taking place on Whatsapp and other messaging platforms such as Mxit.

Facebook

A search network gathered via the Facebook API revealed that Zamdela activists as well as local witnesses of the protests and their aftermath were posting their experiences to Facebook rather than Twitter. This citizen journalism primarily took the form of Facebook status updates posted to personal Facebook pages.

As seen in other contexts, this mode of citizen engagement is highly emotive and dominated by strong expressions of affect. The sample included several attempts to mobilise support for the protests and retaliate for the police killings:

The Facebook sample also included commentary by observers, who were not directly involved in the protests, critical commentary on media coverage, rationales for the protest action and debate among community members, both pro and anti mobilisation.

The sample even included (informal) posts by police officers, who posted Facebook comments of desperation and revenge, apparently while in medias res:

“our hands are full”

“the back up can’t get threw”

“this is now personal”

It is notable that this wide variety of posts and commentary did not include a single image of the protests taken by a participant or a local observer from the community.

There are several possible reasons for why this analysis was unable to identity the visual “voice” of Zamdela activists or the broader community. Posting images on public platforms such as Twitter may have been too risky for protestors. Taking and posting images is relatively difficult on feature phones. Images also require quite a bit of mobile data, which is expensive in South Africa, particularly for cash-strapped consumers who tend to buy prepaid airtime in small denominations. Even zero-rated mobile services (such as Facebook Zero) do not zero-rate images.

Despite the possible problems with posting images, even the text of the Facebook posts would have provided very interesting perspectives and contacts for journalists reporting on the events. Sadly journalists’ were not paying attention to Facebook. In 2013, ‘pavement internet’ and grassroots citizen participation were still pretty invisible to mainstream media.

Being heard

It’s time to go back to Twitter and look at our second question, who gets heard on Twitter? It’s pretty hard to tell exactly what people are paying attention to on social media. Still, in our sample we can see what sources were retweeted and mentioned in the tweets. Judging from this evidence, during the Zamdela protests, the mainstream media, particularly print media and professional photojournalists were highly influential in determining whose perspectives were seen. Citizen media by protesters didn’t’ make much impact and this category was dominated by those tweets by the white right wing that I mentioned earlier.

So, when we think about citizen media which goes viral or gets thrust into the spotlight, we’re thinking about exceptional cases. It’s important to remember that the vast majority of tweets in this sample had very little influence on others discussing the topic of the Zamdela protest. They were neither retweeted nor mentioned by others using the keyword. Instead, a small number of high influence accounts (in this case primarily from mainstream media) received the lion’s share of the retweets and mentions.

In conclusion, I would challenge you to consider how our society and our public media can work against these ‘power laws’ and harness viral to help to equalise public participation. We can see the huge potential of social media to extend and amplify ‘pavement radio’, but there is still extremely limited grassroots use, especially of Twitter. People who do have access and are using the networks to report their experiences are not being heard. Neither are their perspectives being seen.

Nonetheless, I believe both journalists and activists could be playing a huge role in bridging this gap between affordable and accessible messaging platforms and mainstream media. Only when this happens to a far greater extent than it does now will people learn to trust the power of documenting and sharing their experiences, and start to become confident that they, too, are being heard.

We’re hosting the following public lecture at the Centre for Film and Media Studies next week:

The Remaking of Citizens: Media, Civic Participation and Learning.

David Buckingham

Loughborough University, UK

In most Western democracies, young people are seen to be disaffected from civic and political life. Yet while television has been accused of contributing to apathy and alienation, the internet has been proclaimed as a means of stimulating participation and regenerating public debate. In this presentation, I will look back to some older research on children and television, and draw on some more recent work on a large pan-European research project about young people, the internet and civic participation. I will be taking a critical look at the evidence for such claims, but I also want to challenge the terms of this debate, in terms of the dominant constructions of young people, of technology and of citizenship. I will suggest that technology alone will not address the fundamental causes of young people’s disengagement: rather, we need to address more basic issues of social power and inequality, and identify the forms of motivation and competence that young people need to develop if they are to become active citizens.

DATE: 28 AUG

TIME: 4.00PM – 4.45PM

VENUE: ROBERT LESLIE SOCIAL SCIENCE 2D, UPPER CAMPUS, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

David Buckingham is Professor of Media and Communications at Loughborough University, UK. His research focuses on children and young people’s interactions with electronic media, and on media education. His recent books include Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Culture (2007); Global Children, Global Media; Migration, Media and Childhood (2007); Video Cultures: Media Technology and Everyday Creativity (2009); and The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture (2011).

Discussions of ‘game literacy’ focus on the informal learning and literacies associated with games but seldom address the diversity in young people’s gaming practices, and the highly differentiated technologies of digital gaming in use. We use available survey data to show how, in South Africa, income inequalities influence consumption patterns, shaping experiences of digital games. Two case studies of young people’s play practices involving digital games in Cape Town suggest the fragmentation and inequalities of contemporary play practices and the need for a more inclusive understanding of digital gaming. Mobile phones offer more accessibility than other digital gaming platforms and local appropriations include display of micro-commodities, concealment of outdated technology, control strategies and deletion of functionality. Digital games articulate between multiple overlapping communicative spaces and hence complex cultural articulations arise when global game narratives are appropriated to make sense of racial otherness, crime and politics in South Africa. Since educational curricula cater for highly fractured publics, we ask whether it is advisable to speak of ‘game literacy’. We suggest the need to validate less strongly mediatised forms of play, and to address diverse identification practices in consumer culture, including prestige and status as well as othering and shame.

This year for the first time I taught an MA level Mobile Media and Communication course to University of Cape Town postgraduates. It was a great privilege to work with such an bright group of students and spend a semester discussing the relationship between mobile technology and society, and exploring methodologies and theories for studying networked individualism, mobile social networks, mobile media and games. We also considered the place of gender, class and consumer culture in adoption, appropriation and domestication of mobile technologies in South Africa.

Gary Marsden from UCT’s Centre for ICT4D also made a guest appearance. I’m hoping that next year we will find a way for Gary’s mobile interaction design students to work together with us to think through some of the implications of our research for local phone, app and website designers. Here are some of the highlights of the excellent research the CFMS students produced this year.

Desperately seeking multiplayer bluetooth games

By Anja Venter, MA student, Centre for Film and Media Studies.

Ocean View, Cape Town, 24 October 2011 -Young mobile gamers in South Africa have little local content to choose from – and they badly need games which are designed for them to play together, and which they can access without needing to find a computer. A recent study conducted by University of Cape Town student Anja Venter revealed valuable insights into the cellphone use and gaming preferences of eight kids (11 and 12 year olds) in Ocean View, Cape Town. The study is important reading for mobile game developers, and particularly for developers seeking to use mobile games in ICT4D (Information and communications technologies for development).
Venter found that mobile gaming is still very much an individual activity for this group of kids, although they really want to be playing together. Gaming is fundamentally social and kids miss not being able to challenge other players on their cellphones. Modes of collaborative play such as online games are too expensive for local contexts. Enter the accessible nature of the mobile Java gaming platform in combination with Bluetooth technology that has proven to be inexpensive and sustainable: a potential avenue for ad hoc gaming with the people in your immediate surroundings. A trial of such a game proved to be very successful.

Multiplayer Bluetooth Mobile Games

Although this study is limited in scope and is the result of a pilot Masters student study, it offers insights for potential game developers. Currently we see an explosion of mobile phone games, which were developed by international companies, available for free download directly from ones’ mobile phone. Competition in this arena is fierce and avenues for procurement are already in place, perpetuated through word-of-mouth testimonies amongst peers. There is a massive gap in the market when it
comes to Bluetooth multiplayer games that can be downloaded directly to ones’ phone without access to a desktop PC.

This research found that, in order to be successful, these games should be free and cheap to download (hence small in size), easy to find and access solely from a phone. They should work on a diverse range of mobile phones and cater to the intended audience’s interests. For further information, or a copy of the report, contact Anja Venter.

Men, Mobile Users Dominate Miyeni Facebook Debate

By Marise Haumann, Honours student, Centre for Film and Media Studies.

Cape Town, October 24, 2011 – When controversy erupted in the South African media around columnist Eric Miyeni and City Press editor Ferial Haffajee, many people continued debating the issues with friends on their public Facebook profiles. Most of them seem to have been using their cell phones while they listened to the debate raging on local radio stations.

A study by University of Cape Town student, Marise Haumann, titled “Gender and the Public Sphere on Mobile-based Facebook”, looked at 203 public Facebook status updates posted on 2 August to investigate the role of gender in the debate that erupted around Eric Miyeni’s controversial column, “Haffajee does it for white masters”. Several public figures and gender rights organisations accused Miyeni of misogyny and hate speech and he was subsequently sacked from the Sowetan.

Facebook seemed swayed by arguments in favour of Miyeni – 22% of the mobile contributors supported Miyeni, and only 10% disagreed with his statements. But that may have been because fewer women were participating. Unsurprisingly, positions in the debate were influenced by the poster’s gender – with men more likely to express support for Miyeni – 27% of all men using mobile devices supported Miyeni while only 6% of women did so. In contrast, only 9% of men using mobile devices disagreed with Miyeni, while somewhat more female mobile users (13%) disagreed with him.

Support and opposition for Miyeni in Facebook status updates, by Gender

Haumann’s study reveals that while 69% of all the contributors to the debate used mobile devices to access the debate, 30% contributed their opinions through fixed-line internet. A large majority (79%) of all contributors to the debate were men, while only 21% were women. English was the most frequently used language in the debate, but mobile phone users seem to be relatively multilingual. Of the mobile contributors, 6% used English in conjunction with other languages, while only 1% of the fixed-line contributors used other languages in conjunction with English.

The study reveals that although more men than women took part in the debate on Facebook, both men and women received similar numbers of replies to their status updates. Haumann argues that this indicates that while fewer women may have been involved in the debate on both the mobile internet and fixed-line internet, they did not ‘receive a cold shoulder’ in the Facebook debate. She also argues that the fact that men and women exhibited such differences in their opinions on Miyeni indicates that the debate was free and unobstructed by sexism or discrimination. She warns, however, that if more women do not make the effort to enter into such debates, they may see that their opinions will become relegated to the side-lines.

The “Gender and the Public Sphere on Mobile-based Facebook” study was conducted through the postgraduate course in Mobile Media and Communication (FAM5038S) at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town. The study used quantitative content analysis to analyse a sample of 203 individual Facebook status updates, which were collected during the span of one day in August 2011. For further information, contact Marise Haumann.

Talking about Sex and Health on MXit.

By Mareike Kramper

Cape Town, November 1, 2011 – The mobile social site MXit signed a contract with The African Pulse a non-profit organisation with worldwide partners and associates. The company launched the health and sexual awareness portal H360º on the social site MXit.

The H360º forum allows young people from all over the world to participate in discussions around HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Teenagers can ask questions that are of burning importance to them, without the embarrassment of having to ask judgemental adults, or revealing secrets to their peers or ignorance to medical professionals. The online platform provides information on health and sexuality and allows users to connect to other H360º members worldwide. University of Cape Town MA student Mareike Kramper studied the requests posted on the site in order to find out more about what questions young people are asking about HIV/AIDS and sexuality. By studying the language used to express questions or to confess fears, Kramper found that H360º should be enagaging with young people’s everyday understanding of sex, health, love, shame and relationships. She said: “H360º needs to be able to answer questions such as, “I wnt 2 knw y ppls hate gays?” or “If u have love and u use a condom can u get it?”. The battle against social injustice and accurate health behaviour options needs to become part of daily conversations in South Africa.”

For further information, contact Mareike Kramper.

South African political activists mobilising Facebook

By Pierrinne Leukes

24 October 2011, Cape Town

South Africans are using mobile phones for political activism on Facebook, says Pierrinne Leukes, a University of Cape Town (UCT) Masters student majoring in Political Communication.

Some studies have been done about mobiles being used in South Africa for political campaigning and engagement during election times, but so far no studies show us how South Africans are talking politics on their phones a daily basis. South African political parties such as the ANC, DA, COPE and IFP do have Facebook pages but Leukes found that hardly any of the activity on these pages come from mobile phones. Then Leukes found a Facebook group called ‘New Political Forum’, which was started in August 2010 by four South Africans who felt that they could not debate freely on the official Facebook pages belonging to political parties such as the African National Congress and Democratic Alliance. The ‘New Political Forum’ group grew rapidly and now boasts just under 8000 members.

Leukes studied posts and comments over two days. “The level of engagement is impressive” , said Leukes. “On these two days, 49 messages were posted, and they initiated debates which totalled a whopping 1013 comments, again over just two days”. While the pages belonging to the political parties are dominated by computer users, the New Political Forum users are using phones to have their say and engage with fellow citizens. Approximately 60% of all these debates were initiated, and sustained by people using their mobile phones to access Facebook’s mobile site”.

The BB revolution

By Aziza Banderker

Cape Town, October 27, 2011 – South Africans love BlackBerries, but what in particular influences young middle class students to choose to jump on the bandwagon and adopt the popular smartphone? University of Cape Town Honours student, Aziza Banderker, interviewed a group of her BB-using peers to identifywhat factors had persuaded them adopt a Blackberry. And she decided to do so by chatting to them on BBM, the famous BlackBerry messaging service.

Banderker explained her interviewing strategy as follows: “BlackBerries are relatively expensive, and so I tried to find out when the cost of exclusion from BB starts to exceed the cost of adoption, and when that happens, what is actually the deciding factor which helps students justify the cost of the service?”. She considered individual demographics, socio-economic status, personal factors, social influence, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, facilitating conditions, attitude and behavioural intentions. The interviews were constructed in a way in order to discover which of these factors are the most salient for this group of friends.

She found that the majority of the individuals in her social circle had waited till they felt there was a growing trend to adopt this mobile phone before they bought one themselves. Social influence was the greatest determining factor influencing adoption in this particular group. All had learned about BlackBerry via word of mouth. As a cost-saving feature, BlackBerry’s ‘free’ Internet service was one of the most important determining factors.

Gender played an important role. Banderker’s male contacts claimed that their decision process was based on whether the BlackBerry had the integrated features that they required. Female contacts emphasized that features which enhanced their social life were a deciding factor. Personal factors, such as preference and device capabilities, seemed to be the most important mediating factor.

Gaming women on Gameloft

By Jade van Blerk

24 October 2011, Cape Town

Mobile phones are the most popular gaming platform in South Africa, where downloaded and built-in games played on mobile phones are widely available and appeal to a large target market, including many women and girls. Developers such as top mobile developer Gameloft have realised the potential of the female market. UCT student Jade van Blerk asked what images of women these mobile games are using to sell their products, and whether marketing materials for mobile games are reproducing the adolescent stereotypes associated with the traditionally male-dominated world of ‘hard-core’ gaming.

Van Blerk wondered how images of women in cellphone games might compare to the stereotypes that are commonly encountered in other popular media directed at women such as magazine advertisements, where research shows that women are often stereotyped as homemakers or sex objects. Van Blerk explained ‘I was interested in how mobile games might be establishing new images of femininity’. Van Blerk investigated the promotional imagery for a range of 45 mobile phone games selected from the Gameloft website.

Mobile ads from Gameloft

Van Blerk found that traditional gaming stereotypes seemed to have been imported wholesale into mobile games. In the first place, women were underrepresented in comparison to men. If they were depicted they were in the company of men, as sidekicks or symbols used to communicate information about the men in the image. Many images told stories with men carrying out the action, and women being represented in a passive way as the goal,object, or reward of the action. Male game characters confronted the viewer directly, more commonly demanding an emotional response, while women were offered as undemanding eye-candy for the viewer.

In contrast, women were largely depicted as subordinated to men and were often depicted performing what Goffman refers to as ‘appeasement gestures’ such as ‘body canting’ or the ‘bashful knee bend’ In the only case where a woman was the game’s protagonist she still performed appeasement gestures and was posed with a male.

Generalisations about mobile games cannot be made from this small sample of 45 advertisements, but Van Blerk’s research certainly suggests that there would be many opportunities for game developers who make the effort to understand which images appeal to female players.

The conference has been a wonderful way to meet social scientists and humanities scholars studying mobile communication around the world. Kudos to James Katz and the organisers for their success in attracting scholars from such a wide range of countries (20) – we should definitely make sure that there is a larger African contingent at the next meeting. Here is a prepublication draft of the paper, prepared on 22 September 2009. It has corrections added after we submitted the paper, and additional changes and edits are possible, so please check with us before citing. Comments welcome.

‘This paper describes four kinds of mobile mediated political participation observed during the 2009 national elections in South Africa: (1) SMS ‘wars’ in the run-up to the election; (2) .mobi websites hosted by political parties; and the political content included on (3) the mobile social network Mig33 and excluded from (4) its counterpart/competitor, MXit. We discuss the failure of all four forms to support the emergence of a networked or mediated public, and consider how particular properties of the mobile internet, vs. the ‘traditional’ internet, are partially responsible.’

Interesting article on Gamespy about an anti-war in-game protest targetting the U.S. federally funded game “America’s Army”, which is used as a military recruitment tool. Joseph DeLappe logs into the game as dead-in-iraq. Instead of playing, he types the names of the U.S. soldiers who have died since the start of the war (official U.S. figures give a total of 2456)
Here’s his website with some more screenshots.
Great idea. When the administrators boot him off the server, he can just start a new protest with the login name civilians-dead-in-iraq. That should keep him typing for a couple of hundred years.

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A new way of documenting history together – wish we’d had this back in the days of rolling mass action on the streets and beaches of Cape Town…
Flickr slideshows ofFrench employment riotsMLKBLVD – Shots taken on streets called Martin Luther King Boulevard illustrate the distance between King’s vision of equality and the realities of contemporary USA.
And a discussion of how political advocacy groups are using tools like flickr.
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/773